RTW tickets are cost effective. You can usually pay some extra money to massage the dates, and it'll probably still be cheaper than buying tons of tickets (at least when I bought one... not sure how the prices have changes since)

Cost isn't what you're maximizing though. Sure, RTW ticket will run you $1500, whereas three one-way tickets will cost upwards of $2000, but compared to the $12k you'll spend all in, it's just not worth the constraint it places on you.

As an example, five years ago I started a trip that would start on the beach in Thailand, then go up through China and follow the Silk Road across to Turkey. 3 months in, I ended up detouring down to Australia to do a couple month's surfing with a girl who I'd eventually follow back to England and marry.

Had I booked, say, a flight from home from Istanbul ahead of time, I might not have wanted to blow it off and follow that girl who I'd only known for a month.

Traveling is all about freedom to do whatever you want with absolutely zero constraints. Keep that in mind before you buy a piece of paper that forces you to be anywhere at a given time. Even if that anywhere is "Asia" and the given time is "Sometime in the next six months". It's still a constraint, and it will still mess things up.

Yeah, exactly. When I had my RTW ticket you were buying a certain number of miles, a certain number of stops, and 12 months to get back to where you started. You had to book an itinerary when you started, but were free to change it as you went along...

It's waaaay cheaper than buying a series of one way tickets, assuming you make it around half way in to your itinerary (and there's nothing to say you have to use the last leg to take you home - abandon the ticket if going home somehow means your traveling will finish forever).

Costwise this kind of depends on where you're going... overland bus travel in Asia is much cheaper than, say, taking a train domestically in Germany.

But I totally agree on the schedule part. Every time I've booked in advance something has come up that has made me have to change plans, and I've regretted it. Buy one-way tickets and no more than a month in advance.

Have you been travelling alone or with a friend / girlfriend / wife?

I want to do this as well, but the biggest question for me seems to be who to go with or going alone (and then just trying to meet people everywhere)?

Initially, it was just me. Every once in a while I'd manage to convince a friend to fly out and tag along for a few weeks, thus putting one of those dreaded dates on the calendar, but in a good way. Along the way, I picked up a partner who was doing pretty much the same thing. We've scaled back the traveling a bit recently, but I did manage to drag her around South America for 7 months this year.

I'd recommend going by yourself if you have the choice. You just plain meet more people that way, and you don't run the risk of killing off a perfectly good friendship. On the road, you'll notice the same pattern a lot of times: two English girls who have been traveling together for a couple months and have clearly tired of each other's company but are too polite to suggest they go their separate ways. They're miserable, neither one getting to do what they really want, and forced to eat every meal together even though they've already exhausted all the conversation they could ever come up with. Sit down at their table and you'll instantly have two new friends.

Another benefit of traveling alone is that even as an introvert you'll periodically go into "emergency survival social mode" where you realize you haven't spoken to anybody in four days and you need to make some friends Right Now. And you will. It's as simple as walking up to any random gringo and asking "where are you from?"

Don't feel like you can't take more air tickets for short haul trips! What is a better use of your time, a 10 hour bus ride for $25 or a 1 hour flight for $50?

Depends on why you're travelling. Ten hours of seeing the countries you're in might be more gratifying than two hours of being treated like a dangerous animal at an airport and one hour of biting your knees in a plane.